I’m not sure if anybody is still “on” this one outside of the irredeemable bearded fanboy set, but it never hurts to continue kicking bad movies when they’re down. The only thing “blacker” than Sin City’s aesthetics are the souls of its creators who wrapped this nonsense in the garb of artistry and sold it to unsuspecting audiences under the aegis of innovation. I suppose a filmed comic book featuring three castrations might count as a benchmark of some kind (though it has been a few years since I’ve sat down with Caligula), but whatever enjoyment you draw from them is, most decidedly, determined by personal preference. What are the rest of us left with? Turgid prose, further dismemberments, blood, guns, lots of leather. Let’s not mention its Paleolithic male-female interactions—in Miller’s universe women are required to be partially nude or at least sporting a tightly laced bodice. The whole enterprise is an obvious struggle for the performers (Rourke does okay, but Alexis Bliedel: go back to Gilmore) to create character from the cookie-cutter molds they’re bound to, figuratively by Miller’s “universe,” and literally, by the overlaid formal interventions. But if it hurt them, it hurt me more.

Back when El Mariachi made his name, we gave Robert Rodriguez a free pass (dude sold his blood for cinema—right on!), and I can even get up a little bit for the first Spy Kids movie. The buck stops here. There is nothing new or interesting or good about Sin City, not in its, yes, seamless green-screen effects work, and most certainly not in its hipster nihilism, and I wish there was some way to erase its inky stain from a year that saw the release of so many essential works of cinema (see: our Top Ten). But there isn’t, nor is there a way to prevent the sequel from dropping like the turd that it will most certainly be all over Third Quarter 2006, or to prevent further iterations spun from the sad, pathetic, juvenile world that occupies Miller’s mind. If there was an award for “Dumbest Shit Ever,” this piece of trash would surely get my ’05 vote. Oh, and did I mention that it’s JUST A FUCKING COMIC BOOK?